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A History of Rogue
blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has published "The History of Rogue: Have @ You, You Deadly Zs." Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades. What is it about Wichman and Toy's old UNIX RPG that has sent so many gamers to their deaths in the Dungeons of Doom, desperately seeking the fabled Amulet of Yendor? This article covers the history of the game, including the Epyx failure to make a ton of cash selling it in 1983. It also goes into rogue-like culture and development."
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals, Rogue has continued to excite gamers and programmers worldwide, and has been ported, enhanced, and forked now for over two decades.
Despite? Given how easily we could at least put a simple tileset on the game to make things more realistic, I'd say that Roguelikes' ongoing popularity must be at least in part _because_ of the primitive graphics. A high-rez animated monster can only ever be a high-rez animated monster, exactly as you see it on the screen. But the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better. It's just like the way books are satisfying in a way that movies can never quite be.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
People would have figured out how to spell it.
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... if the graphics are simpler the developers can spend more time on the AI. And if theres only a few developers this is a big deal. Its probably why most text based MUDs were generally more imaginative than WoW and its clones.
So as a young noob I quite like these old games, but I have to admit I prefer tilesets over text, can anybody recommend a gui frontend for rogue?
Best I've found for nethack was a qtnethack* which really sucked in some areas, is there something similar for rogue? Hell is there something that can act as a frontend for both?
*I know there if flacon's eye but I found it much harder to see whats going on in 3D
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I'm holding my breath for the day somebody develops a truly co-operatively multiplayer version. (No, sharing bones files/score tables doesn't count.) I know it will probably mean sacrificing turn-based play, but adding human interactivity into the already complex world(s) of Rogue will be amazing.
Question everything?
Despite only the most 'primitive' audiovisuals I'm still addicted to its descendants. They have some features not easily found in modern games, above all the difficulty and the challenge. Modern games often seem to be designed to let the player win.
Along the same lines as Rogue, it is probably one of the reasons for a strategy game I still like Empire. All pieces are the same on both sides and all cities are equal. It is a game of strategy with chance rolled in; that being the frequency of finding cities or the enemy. No gimmicky special powers (read : wtf ) that one side has that the other does not.. no fancy animations to get in the way of what something does.
Simple games can be the best games... I am still waiting for someone to replicate Starflight
As for WOW and weather....
or at least someone on a message board somewhere else did, the weather effects do not affect NPCs nor their property because they have the weather effects slider set to off. Spells are not affected because their "magic". mmmmkay?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Offtopic? Idiot moderator.
I never got a playable Moria compiled on any of my systems. Basically, it was a VMS only game. The Unix ports never worked all that well.
Or maybe just the game play sucked. I never seemed to get past the rooms of spreading lice.
While porting nethack, 'way back when, we wanted to be sure that all of the levels worked, so we added a terminator-like character for the test players. Immune to poisons, more robust, ... Then one died down about level 23, and, of course, came back as a ghost. Made the game much tougher to win when playing as a tourist or whatever.
No, we didn't purge it from the system. That would be cheating.
The DS is a roguelike gamers paradise at this point. I'm amazed how many commercial ones that are out there. You've got something for the hardcore, the weeaboos, the kids and the computer nerds. The nethack port is worth the price of a flash cart alone. It's better than the wince/wm port!
I know there's ones I've missed. There's also a ground-up game coded for the GBA and ported to the DS.
--- Do you believe in the day?
My favorite Rogue-like will always be Ancient Domains of Mystery. The control system is so much better than Nethack.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I guess you could say it's an... *sunglasses* ... Epyx fail.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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Indeed. I can play Rogue all day at work, and everyone else assumes that I'm working at something really complicated and "techy."
Without Rogue there would be no Nethack and no Dwarf Fortress.
And I could probably have used all that time to write a frakkin' book or something, instead of zapping ghosts with a wand of polymorph or dropping merchant caravans into lava just to see what would happen.
For NetHack, there's the TAEB - Tactical Amulet Extraction Bot. It's a framework for developing NetHack AIs, written in Perl. Its development still seems to be going strong but it hasn't managed to ascend a game yet, which is not an easy accomplishment for an AI.
Sartak, a TAEB author, recently managed to predict NetHack's PRNG to acquire infinite wishes from fountains. This is considered an exploit of course, and has since been patched on public NetHack servers. Still, pretty impressive :)
I think there's a Twitter feed with TAEB's game progress somewhere, but I don't have the link.
http://taeb-nethack.blogspot.com/
No. What Dwarf fortress needs, desperately, is a better UI. I'm not just talking about proper graphics, though that would be a part of it. Even the developers have admitted that they have streched the limits of what is possible with ASCII characters.
Currently, Dwarf fortress is like a rocket ship, with literally hundreds of knobs, buttons and switches. It's frequently impossible to figure out what is going on and how to do anything about it. Which is tragic because almost everyone who sees the game _wants_ to know what is going on and to interact with the world as much as possible.
Something like Falcon's Eye shows the way. Meaningful graphics which convey the maximium amount of information in the least time, and context sensitive menus, which only display relevant options. Better still would be the creation of a system that relied on only a few "verbs", with objects in the world as nouns. As the saying goes "Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard."
May the Maths Be with you!
Winning a roguelike is much like the first time you beat your chess teacher or parents in any game that required a bit of logic or skill. It's something you remember. One of the few digital bits that I make sure survives all of my data migrations from machine to machine is a copy of the output of my first ascension in Nethack.
Date: 1997/06/12
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Odin booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigoddess...--More--
The scary/awesome part is I still remember more about the last level in that ascension than I do large parts of my childhood schooling.
--- I do not moderate.
I played that a couple of times - my first character ended up on a level with some kind of rapidly multiply dungeon lice unable to progress any further.
The second time I played, my level 3 character stepped on top of a trapdoor, fell all the way to the bottom level (a dark maze), landing on top of the balrog, giving it some damage, walked blindly into the balrog again, killing it, and winning the game.
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The first version of Rogue that was widely circulated became quite a time sink for a lot of people at Caltech. This version was considerably harder than subsequent versions. It was extremely rare for anyone to actually win the game, by getting down deep, getting the Amulet of Yendor, and making it out alive.
One undergraduate, however, had no trouble beating it. Within a couple days of his starting playing, he had all the spots on the top score list, and all of them were total winners.
He then stopped playing, except when anyone else dared to take a spot on the top score list. Then he'd come to computing center, sit down, and 30 minutes later, the interloper would be pushed off the list.
Naturally, we all wondered how the hell this guy was so much better than the rest of us (and, based on what our contacts at other schools told us, better than anyone at their schools, too). He didn't do anything to hide when playing--he didn't play in an office with a private terminal. He played right out in the main terminal room, where anyone who wanted could stand behind and watch.
As far as anyone could see, he didn't do anything significantly different than the rest of us, other than he died a lot less than we did.
Finally, he told us the secret, and we all learned an important lesson. There was no big secret--he just made every little decision correctly. For example, if he had to explore a dark room, he did it in the minimum number of steps necessary. The rest of us would use the "run until you hit something" funciton and sweep the room, which made us step on more locations, which made us have a higher chance of springing a trap.
Traps usually weren't fatal. They just put you down a few hit points for a little while. But in that little while, a monster that he would barely survive, we would barely lose to.
After he got the Amulet and was on the way up, he would only step on locations he'd already stepped on while descending, and so he NEVER sprang a trap on the way up.
He knew the odds of everything (based on observation while playing, not based on looking at the code), and would use potions or scrolls at the time when they had the maximum expected utility.
He did this for EVERY decision point in the game. He made the decision that, based on all the data available at the time, was the best decision.
None of the things I listed above, or any of the other things he did perfectly that the rest of us only did 99% perfectly would make a noticeable difference by themselves. But put them all together, and all our tiny mistakes added up to losing for us, and the lack of any mistakes added up to winning for him.